1. About
2. Purpose

This is a modified version of randomsparkles.py (renamed to random_sparkles.py) from the example folder in ThePiHut/rgbxmastree. It adds the following functionalities:

1. Adds the shebang #!/usr/bin/python3 so the script can be run directly
2. Initialises the pixels to green
3. Adds a sleep(0.1) timer on each loop so as to not thrash the cpu
4. On keyboard interrupts/SIGINT, turns the tree off and 'closes' the tree

In addition, there is a bash script xmas-tree-kill.sh, which will send a SIGINT to the tree to enforce a graceful shutdown.

There is also tree-off.py, a simple script to turn off a tree that for some reason is still switched on without any scripts running to control it.

I like automating stuff. I have a cron job that runs the python script on Dec 1st:

0 0 1 12 * /path/to/xmas-tree/random_sparkles.py #enable xmas tree lights

I have another that turns the tree off on Jan 6th:

0 0 6 1 * /usr/bin/killall -s SIGINT random_sparkles.py

There is another shell script check-tree-on.sh which is also meant to be used in a reboot macro in cron:

@reboot /path/to/check-tree-on.sh

This script checks if the date is Dec 1st or later, or Jan 5th or earlier. If so, it starts the randomsparkles.py script. This ensures the script is running after a reboot between these dates.

The script xmas-tree-kill.sh is provided mainly for completeness, even though I don't use it myself.

I haven't forked ThePiHut/rgbxmastree because I only edited the one file.